Abortion: The Practical Consequences

There have been almost three million abortions performed in Canada since the legalization thereof in 1969.

If you accept the premise of our cultural elites that this is a settled issue, of no particular moral or practical importance for reflection or reconsideration, then that number is an irrelevant statistic.

But we're not here to accept their premises at face value.

If the moral questions trouble you, consider the practical questions first.

Three million native-born Canadians were not born who could have been. Most of them now would be productive citizens, contributing their talents and labour to Canadian society. Many of them in turn would now have had children of their own.

To replace them, we have had to import millions of immigrants who otherwise could be contributing to their own native lands. Many of these immigrants have been lured here using a cruel bait and switch, with promises of ready work in their professional fields, only to have their qualifications rejected and able to find only unskilled or menial work--the kind of work that supposedly is too good for native-born Canadians to do.

Many of these same people have been actively discouraged from assimilating into the broader Canadian culture in favour of remaining segregated from Canadian society as separate tiles on our multicultural mosaic. Indeed, our education system and popular culture teaches them to denigrate the history and traditions of their host nation, where they are not simply ignored.

The demographic effects on our society have become too obvious to ignore, though our cultural elites strive mightily to ignore them.

Would the divisive ethnic politics played so often in this country be as frequently or as damagingly played, if we had not had to take in so many immigrants in the first place?

Would we have raised a generation of Canadians whose only connection to the country is an accident of birth, who remain loyal only to old tribal and sectarian loyalties, and who consider Canada a safe staging area for fighting old battles and a possible theatre for new ones?

Think also of the economic consequences.

Millions of productive citizens, creating economic prosperity and contributing tax revenue to the public treasury, are not in the economy who could have been.

Again, we have had to import cheap foreign labour and depend increasingly on women working outside the home in their prime childbearing years, with the knock-on effects of driving real wages down and also driving down tax revenue as well.

The children who were not born, and the children who were of course not born to them, could have sustained the social safety net on which Canadians pride themselves, without fears of impending collapse under the weight of obligations for which there are not taxpayers to help meet.

We are now setting up the foundations of a generational conflict in which the younger will see the older as an insupportable economic burden. As the older generation liquidated much of the younger out of self-interest, so the younger will liquidate the surviving older out of self-interest, as the unspoken but instinctual revenge for the hecatomb imposed on it.

Legalized unrestricted abortion has created a fundamental breach in the social contract between generations. Every child today knows that his parents could have had him killed as a matter of convenience; every parent now fears that they may face the same fate in their senescene.

No people can survive a war of parents against their children.